Caprica: Pilot

Our story opens in the V-club, which you can tell is a place up to no good because it's full of teenagers having sex, fighting each other, killing each other, engaging in human sacrifice, and listening to techno music. Zoe Graystone talks to two of her friends as they watch her virtual copy. The copy is, sadly, more believable than her friend Ben, who frankly sounds like he just read his lines for the first time that morning.

Anyway, the copy of Zoe de-rezzes (see, Battlestar took its slang from Blade Runner, so Caprica's going to have to steal its slang from some other 80s thing: Tron). Real-Zoe gets in trouble, but promises to perform "tweakage" on the virtual copy. Did the writers get all their knowledge of kids from Buffy and their technology ideas from cult 80s films?

So we meet her parents - Daddy's a major player in this show. Daniel Graystone is played by Eric Stoltz, which makes me wish I'd seen him in more stuff than just Pulp Fiction.

Zoe and her avatar talk - the avatar is pretty much exactly like her only a tad more judgemental. (Here's the first thing that makes no frakking sense to me: the avatar supposedly is Zoe, but Zoe knows why Zoe-A is so important, and Zoe-A apparently doesn't.)

So the kids run away, but then Ben blows himself up rather than admit he only read the first page of the script. Unfortunately, he kills Zoe, as well as Tamara Adams and her mother. Tamara's daddy is Civil Liberties Lawyer... I mean, defense attorney for the mob Joseph Adama, idol and enemy of Romo Lampkin, father of Bill, and owner of one very special lighter.

So in this scene there's some stuff that doesn't make sense to me. Zoe uses a piece of magic paper to send a message to her mother, and it says "message sent." By "message sent," I assume they meant the message was sent, but later we find out it didn't get there, somehow. Why is she using a piece of magic paper? Is magic paper really going to replace the iPhone and not the other way around? Check out how long it takes her to type the first four words of her message; we've got faster stuff today.

Then there's Ben, who's willing to up and murder his best friend. Why? Was she mocking his acting ability? It doesn't make any sense, and by the time the pilot movie ends we still only have the vague idea that Polly Walker might be behind it in some way.

Now contrast this with the way Battlestar Galactica opened. We know about the Cylon War, about the 40-year silence. Six walks in, kisses the guy, nukes the station. War is on. Six is in the market, killing the baby, a model with no acting experience doing a better job than Ben Stark (yeah, I'm picking on him because he's flat and his character makes no sense). Six has sex with Baltar, tells him she used him to get into the defense mainframe. We know what's going on here.

There's an obvious 9/11 subtext. "As of this moment, we are at war." People grieve, but they get ready for what looks like it's just going to be a black-and-white struggle (which the show then gleefully subverts every chance it gets). Roslin pulls an LBJ and gets sworn in on a passenger jet. The miniseries uses historical references to put us in a familiar world.

Nothing of the sort is really attempted in Caprica. Yeah, there's a terrorist attack, but what's the point? Who are the Soldiers of the One? "As you know," they worship the one true God, but what do they really want? What could cause Ben Stark to murder his girlfriend and a bunch of other civilians? The Cylons want to nuke the Colonies until all the humans are dead; later on, we learn that Cavil wants to prove to five specific people that mankind isn't worth saving, but we don't even need to know anything about that plotline to get the BSG miniseries. Meanwhile, a terrorist blows up a train, and the only noticeable change is that now an anti-terrorism officer is harassing a grieving mother.

Adama and Graystone sit in a coffee shop and smoke for a couple of hours. Look at us! Smoking! Yeah, we're subversive, aren't we? It's not like Mad Men does this day in and day out.

So after that, Graystone invites Adama to a C-Bucs game. And he gives this guy he just met his private number. This is before he knows that he can exploit Adama's grief to his advantage, using Adama's mob connections to steal the MCP (Master Control Program? STOP USING TERMS FROM TRON!!!!)

Next, Lacy goes to see Zoe-A in what's totally not the Matrix, honest, and when she finds Zoe-A covered in blood, she screams. Now, later we'll see that both Lacy and Adama unconsciously say what they say in V-world out in the real world too, so why doesn't that scream alert the Graystone household that something's wrong? Why does Lacy have to be in the Graystone household to find Zoe-A's magic room? They weren't at the beginning.

So they do the "you're just a thing" thing, and we talk about how Zoe-A has memories even though she's been compiled from data about Zoe's birth control perscriptions (and about eighty gazillion other sources).

Fortunately, as happens whenever I start griping about things not following their own frakking rules, a character I like shows up. Graystone shows up, but Lacy runs away.

Now, Adama's a lawyer, so I guess we have to show him in a court of law. Turns out Adama and his underworld buddies have bribed the judge (so... in the entire BSG/Caprica verse, the fairest trial we've ever seen is... Gaeta nearly being executed by the Circle).

Graystone has his own problems; he's about to lose his contract to build robots for the military because his robot can't shoot a mobile bowling pin with a painball gun. How hard can it be? The computer can always manage to shoot me whenever I play Half-Life 2, and Gordon Freeman can't move half as fast as the bowling pin. Per "Rebirth," it's because the robot isn't intuitive or some such, but 1) how smart is Serge, the Graystones' robot butler, and 2) how "intuitive" are the NPCs in any modern video game?

Then we have the scene where the kid asks the uncomfortable questions about death, but this scene is quickly interrupted because Daniel Graystone is too busy making important discoveries. Now as much as I'll complain about Season 3 of BSG chasing its own tail for the sake of character pieces, this show has pretty much the opposite problem. I want to see Adama realize that his wife and daughter were on that train. I want to see Adama talk to his son about it.

See, among the many, many other things Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to make it one of the greatest television shows ever, it always stuck with the characters in the middle of really awkward, uncomfortable, emotional scenes. There was no relief for the audience (say, by cutting to a different scene) because there was no relief for the characters. Nobody ever talked through their problems off-screen. There's a scene in "Innocence" where, just to prove to the audience how Angel is truly gone, Angelus spends a good three minutes completely shattering Buffy's heart.

At least Daniel Graystone's story is interesting enough to make up for the character bits I miss from Adama's story. Graystone gets Zoe's friend, Lacy, to show him Zoe-A. Then Graystone steals Zoe-A and puts it in a Cylon body. (Hey, this guy's supposed to be some sort of genius, right? If there's a risk of something going wrong, how about you copy Zoe-A's program? You yourself aren't really sure whether she's your daughter or just a tool to help keep your contract from being stolen by a competitor.)

(Further note to self: be sure to mock Baltar's supposed genius credentials on the next BSG review, too.)

Graystone shows Adama a copy of his daughter, Tamara, but Adama's not quite as quick a convert to the Church of the Robot Soul (established 1982). Still, he's perfectly willing to help Graystone steal the MCP from his competitor.

So Adama agrees to give the defense minister a message in exchange for his mob buddies getting the MCP. The defense minister has Tyrell's glasses from Blade Runner, because hey, why not? Either you get the reference, or you don't, and if you don't, why are you watching this? Then Graystone has sex with his wife while Adama's brother kills the minister.

So basically Graystone is this amoral businessman who's willing to steal from his competitor and corrupt his daughter's work in order to keep his contract... except then he was sad he couldn't suceed in putting his daughter in the robot. This makes him a complex, nuanced character. But because they kept cutting away from the Adama storyline, and because they left a bunch of material invovling Mrs. Graystone and Sister Clarence Willow on the cutting room floor, I don't really have that much of a feel for their characters yet.

See, in the Battlestar Galactica pilot/miniseries, you got to know all these characters. Adama was this crusty old guy who had the respect of his underlings, Tigh was a functional drunk with an estranged wife, Starbuck was an ace pilot but also a world-class screwup partly because of the guilt she felt in getting her boyfriend killed, Apollo wasn't a chip off the old block at all, Roslin was either an obstructivist schoolteacher or a cancer-stricken heroine who rallied a civilian fleet, or both, and Baltar was a sleazebag with an imaginary girlfriend. Basically what I know about Joseph Adama at this point is that he's a defense attorney for the mob, and he doesn't know how to raise his son.

Epilogue: The Perils of Prequels

We're in a similar trap here to the one that the Star Wars prequels fell into. Now, that's not entirely fair, because Caprica doesn't have a cartoon rabbit, an awful love story, and an over-reliance on CGI instead of characters (although I'm not sure I like how much attention the Cylon prototype is getting, and I applaud the decision to have Zoe stand in for the robot a lot once we get to the series proper). We have much better characters, (let's face it, saturday morning cartoons have better characters than the Star Wars prequels) but the story's in a similar dilemma because we all know where it ends up. The very first thing on the screen is a title card that says "Caprica: 58 years before the Fall." We go into this thinking that we know how it's all going to end.

All we knew about the way Battlestar Galactica was going to end was that they were probably going to find Earth (they did), and that they were probably going to discover 12 Cylon models along the way (they did). We didn't know who those Cylons were, who would die along the way, what state we'd find Earth in, how well the Roslin-Adama alliance would last, whether Starbuck and Apollo would ever frak, whether Starbuck would ever confess to Adama about the real circumstances of Zak's death, or even when the entire show takes place.

Not nearly as many plotlines are set up here. We have the Soldiers of the One and whatever Polly Walker's up to, but it's harder to care because we all know they'll be dead in 58 years. Here we know that the Cylons will become self-aware, that Joseph Adama will live long enough to know his grandson Lee, that Zoe-A is somehow going to have to magically vanish, they're going to lose that magic paper technology and the holobands, and that it's all going to end in a nuclear holocaust. We think we know little Willie Adama's going to make it, but that's subverted far too late.

So, and especially given the way "Daybreak" divided the Galactica fanbase, I really think Caprica should have been an independent show instead of a prequel.